Why history will be rewritten in UFC 166's heavyweight trilogy

I don’t mean that in the repeated concussions sense, though getting hit in the head for a living is also probably not great for remembering where you left your car keys. I just mean as a fan, as someone who watches all the action and thinks they understand how everything fits together.

The soon-to-be completed trilogy between UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez (12-1 MMA, 10-1 UFC) and former champ Junior dos Santos (16-2 MMA, 10-1 UFC) at UFC 166 is as good an example as any in how what comes next can influence our perceptions of what came before, or at least I suspect it will be by the time Saturday’s pay-per-view event is all over.

Think about their first fight. The UFC’s debut on the FOX network, millions of people tuning in for one fight, future lightweight champion Benson Henderson turning in one of his most exciting UFC performances in an untelevised undercard bout with Clay Guida – all that. What happened there was, after all the pomp and circumstance, JDS went out and stuck one in Velasquez’s ear in the very first minute.

Velasquez ended the night face-down on the canvas. Dos Santos ended it with belt around his waist. UFC President Dana White had to settle for getting apoplectic about Velasquez’s game plan on network TV.

Maybe I’m just speaking for myself here, but it seems like the collective MMA hivemind doesn’t think the same thing about that first fight now as it did then. The narrative changed. First we heard rumors of a knee injury that would have forced Velasquez out of any fight but the big FOX debut. Not that his team was making excuses, mind you. They were, you know, just sayin’.

Lots of people “just say” after a big loss, and this one might have joined Tito Ortiz‘s cracked skull and Chris Leben‘s post-weigh-in candy binge in the MMA Hall of Shame, except that Velasquez went right out in the rematch and gave us reason to think he had been significantly diminished in that first go-round. This time he was the one who landed the big punch, followed by a bunch of little ones, and after nearly a half-hour of suffering, it was dos Santos’ turn to figure out what went wrong.

Answer? Over-training. That most self-congratulatory of faults, something straight out of a guide to acing job interviews. My greatest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist.

That’s how it looks now, at least. Another fighter trying to find something to tell himself and everyone else. But what if he goes out on Saturday night and plants Velasquez on the canvas again? What then?

That’s the real importance of this trilogy fight. It determines not only who gets bragging rights in the best-of-three series, but also whose version of past defeats takes hold. It’s the rare even where the UFC’s chosen tagline – “History Is Written By The Winner” – actually seems apt. It’s not that this fight will change anything about the how this rivalry has played out, but it will change how we think of it.

Then again, who knows if this is a series that will stop at three? I kind of hope so. Not because I don’t enjoy watching these two fight, but because three seems like such a reasonable number for combat sports. There’s something final about a trilogy, something that leaves us feeling like the matter is decided. If they were to go on trading wins and losses far beyond that, it might make it seem less like a score that’s been settled than a coin that you could keep flipping for years.

Three seems fine. Three seems appropriate. It also seems just big enough of a sample size that we’ll end up taking one man’s version of what happened, why, and what it all means. We can have our one true story of the Velasquez-JDS fights without being distracted by too much competing noise.

Whose story it ends up being, that’s the part we don’t know yet. That’s the part we’ll figure out on Saturday night.

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